Watchers hope Montreal’s whale tale has a happy ending

MONTREAL - Off the coast of Old Montreal, the unprecedented sight of a humpback whale breaching in the surging waters of the St. Lawrence has come as a welcome distraction for pandemic-weary urbanites.

But alongside the wonder runs a current of fear things could turn out badly, and hope the wayward tourist will return to his or her proper home 400 kilometres downstream before it’s too late.

“It’s bittersweet,” said Charlotte Nadeau, one of hundreds of whale watchers on the boardwalk near the Clock Tower in Montreal’s Old Port Wednesday, many with children. They “oohed” and “aaahed” each time the whale surfaced as close as 100 metres offshore, near enough to hear it spout.

“It’s so rare that I can see something like this, so close and from land,” Nadeau said. “But, at the same time, I’m worried for her safety.”

Nadeau and friend Karine Lapointe are among a handful of volunteers conscripted to work on a “whale surveillance team,” recording the whale’s movements and that of boats in the region for the Whales Online monitoring site run by the Quebec Marine Mammal Emergency Network.

Nadeau is certain COVID19 is responsible for the humpback’s appearance here since Saturday because the pandemic diminished boat and shipping traffic that would normally have scared it off.

No one is certain why the adolescent — two to three years old and, at 10 metres long and 30 tonnes, slightly shorter and twice as heavy as a city bus — decided to become the first humpback known to have visited Montreal. It might have decided to venture from its normal summer home upstream close to Tadoussac or along the North Coast in the Gaspé to seek food sources away from adult competition.